Sarah Martinez

For the Mommies: a few words about mommy porn

Sarah Martinez — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:36:30 GMT

In honor of mother’s day, this post is dedicated to the mommies, though not kid friendly.

This ABC piece seems to be in favor of mommy porn.

This article is very much against.

Do I give a shit? No. I am not for or against Shades of Gray, Twilight or any of the other products that apparently fall into the classification of “mommy porn,” at least for the purposes of this post.

What I am posting this sunny Mother’s Day afternoon is a good old fashioned rant along the lines of the cursing mommy. Don’t expect this to be pretty or even very coherent*. As I write I am thinking about the mommies. Those strong, brave, fully functioning women who even after years of marriage, even after having kids still have sex. What a concept, one the rest of the world seems to have forgotten. So because you have kids, and care about your kids athletic and educational endeavors, does that mean that you have morphed into some nonsexual being? Apparently, or else they wouldn’t call smut which does not even feature mommies getting sexed up, or even porn made by women who have children, “mommy porn.”

Who came up with this term anyway? I suspect it was some cute little twenty three year old who is still laboring under the delusion that the random sex she might be lucky to get a few times a week with young inexperienced men can come close to what is possible in the mommy world. Or maybe we can thank some sixty year old editor at the UK Daily mail who has to take drugs just to be able to service his wife and the mistress he desperately needs to convince himself he is virile. I would like to tell whoever it is that this is the stupidest most condescending label to come along in quite a while.

I hate labels in general, it irks me to no end that people need to put other people in boxes because their imaginations are too small to conceive of human beings who have more than one side to their personality. Gay men who ride horses, or what about the porn star who has children. Yeah… this particular trend seems to horrify people all over the place. Like they finally figured out what all those parts were really for. Assholes who get offended by women who nurse in public but can’t get enough of the titty fuck scenes in the porno movies. What did you think that white stuff was on that enormous breast? I guess it would be better to imagine a giant glob of semen than milk that would feed a child. Cripes. Told you this might not be pretty.

What about daddy porn? Oh, wait, that’s been around forever, it’s called Playboy. Guys can flip through and remember the tight perky ass they used to get before their hair fell out, their gut expanded and their boobs grew in. Did it need a name? No because men aren’t expected to give up their sex drive at any age. I already mentioned they take pills to get the shit back.

Not like women. Apparently we have a much smaller window of time when it is acceptable for us to want sex. It seems like it is from about age eighteen to thirty… roughly. That’s what we get, about twelve years, less if we become mommies in our twenties.

ABC also did a bit on the young male porn star James Deen that some teenage girls follow on twitter. Here is a link with some funny commentary afterward. The tone of the piece was shock and awe that these girls were watching porn. The interviewer tried to accuse the poor dude of luring them in. Of course, the girls wouldn’t look for him on their own, they had to have been coerced or somehow talked in to it. The other incredibly insulting message that all of this gives is that we don’t know our own minds. It doesn’t matter that on the ground girls have been watching porn and (gasp) giving blow jobs, playing with themselves, and even in some extremely rare and unfortunate cases, getting knocked up—forever— though it is beyond the realm of public imagination to consider that teenage girls might get horny and or curious about their feelings and what to do with them.

Girls, as the standard story goes, only use sex to get boys to do something for them. He has to go to fucking Jared after all. And then once they have trapped that man into marrying them, you know that one preferably with rock hard abs and lots of money (according to the ABC piece, that’s what women want), they shut down again after they have kids and don’t care about sex anymore, then they need mommy porn to get the sex drive back. It is just inconceivable that a girl could want to sleep with a boy because she likes him, because he has pretty eyes, because he, of all things, listens to her. Never mind why a middle aged woman would want it.

What this stupid fucking term: “mommy porn” really means is that you need a separate type of porn because you have no idea how to be a sexual being on your own so you need these little entertainment aids. And, because we don’t know what we want, we need some easy to read novels to explain it to us and make it all, you know accessible for our dull minds. According to popular notions, none of us has ever read Story of O, or read the Marquis de Sade. If this wonderful mommy porn hadn’t come along, we women with our kids and dull clueless husbands would suffer a totally undersexed existence. Did it never occur to anyone, including the academic who wrote the piece about how fantasizing about submission is setting the women’s movement back a hundred years, that books written about submission have been around forever. Sade, Masoch (nobody EVER brings up Venus in Furs when having that discussion because wanting to be submissive is only a female fantasy and evidence to the contrary would contradict the theory).

Fucking Please. Fuck Me Running. Fuck me at the top of a flag pole. My God. Ok, not as bad as the cursing mommy, but I continue to try.

Here are a few lines from Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, a memoir I read recently that made me stop and think. Like great lines do for me in books, these filled me with gratitude:

“But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics-mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers-their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds.”

Women can carry worlds but they can’t experience them, according to the simple minded mainstream media. Why is it so incredibly hard for people to imagine mommies having any sort of life besides the domestic? No fantasy life. No sex life, which by the way common sense would tell you gets better the longer you are married. Fucking Duh.

Anne Rice wrote erotica after she had kids and nobody called that mommy porn did they? Marco Vassi wrote his memoirs and fiction after he got a woman pregnant. Does that negate the words, just because he had also at once time managed to procreate? Updike, Miller, and a slew of other men wrote their best smut after they became fathers and no one would dream of questioning their position in the world of sexual thinkers, that would just be stupid, yet some randy English woman and a Mormon with three kids write a few words and suddenly it’s “mommy porn.”

Say it with me: “Fuck This Shit.”

Fuck the labels. Let us want what we want and can we not use the term “mommy porn” to describe anything, ever, please? Fuck the labels. I don’t believe in them and no right minded mother should either. Let us fantasize, let us enjoy the bodies that are so often given over for the use of everyone else. We lovingly, willingly give them to our children, our spouse, for comfort, for sustenance, so why not acknowledge that we can also still feel pleasure and want to feel good? Fuck the labels. Let us live and read what we want and ignore those who would judge and try to stick some tiny label on us for doing so.

You can have kids and be an artist. You can have kids and be a thinker. You can have kids and never read anything by Stephanie Meyer or EL James because the shit bores the crap out of you. You can have kids and watch porn. You can have kids and read Twilight because that is all your hormone ravaged, sleep deprived brain will allow you to focus on. You can have kids and write smut if that’s what you want. You can have kids and read smut if you want.

Just don’t admit that you have kids and orgasms or their tiny tiny world will implode.

*Hubby is agitating for a trip to the park and I want to get this up before the sun goes down on this day dedicated to some of my favorite people.

Fear of Flying: Literature Not Erotica

Sarah Martinez — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:55:01 GMT

I have tried to read this book over the years three or four separate times. Each time I was unable to get past the opening scene. Where’s the sex I wanted to know? What’s with all the shrinks, and God they are a dull bunch. This is supposed to be an erotic book right? Turns out the place I needed to be to get this book was a long time in coming. J

Here’s what Marco Vassi--the most intelligent erotic writer of all time-- said about erotic writing and Fear of Flying in particular.

“Fear of Flying is an extraordinary erotic book, but it’s basically a literary novel. The eroticism is of the novel. Erotic literature is literature in which eroticism is the novel. It focuses on that. It also implies a certain degree of description, a certain hard core. And to find novels in which you have plot, character, literary quality, plus detailed and real moving descriptions of fucking is a rarity.”

Writing about sex and writing to arouse the reader are different things which too often get confused. I would like to see that change. Just because someone writes honestly about sex, or thinking about sex, does not make the book an erotic book, even if one or two passages really make your blood boil.*

What about those “detailed and real moving descriptions of fucking?” Almost all of the sex scenes presented in this book were disappointing at some level. When she is having sex there isn’t much emotional connection, when she is emotionally connected, or really turned on someone can’t get it up. This is a very different reading experience than something like the arcade scenes in Exit to Eden. What you will find in this book are honest discussions on the topic of sex: sexual freedom, sexual fantasy, sexual repression, sexual confusion.

Call me stunted, call me slow, but it has taken me a long time to say these things out loud so to find someone else who has already done it so well is a gift. Here’s a passage that I marked all to hell it was so relatable. For me it was liberating to see these words in print.

“Perhaps sex accounted for my fury. Perhaps sex was the real Pandora’s box. My mother believed in free love…Yet of course, she did not, or why did she say that boys wouldn’t respect me unless I played “hard to get” ? That boys wouldn’t chase me if I “wore my heart on my sleeve,” that boys wouldn’t call me if I “made myself cheap” ?

Sex, I was terrified of the tremendous power it had over me. The energy, the excitement, the power to make me feel totally crazy! What about that? How do you make that jibe with “playing hard to get”?”

Vassi says this is, “Basically a literary novel.” Thank you! This was my thought as I read though the passages that changed point of view, tense, and fell smoothly into profound or hilarious rumination. Isadora does lots of fantasizing, especially what I suspect both women and men can relate to--the zipless fuck. Intrigued? Read the book. I would say the purest version of this for me has always been found in books, alone with my authors and their words…After you read the book you can let me know what you think.

When I started raving on Facebook a family friend said she hated the book and sent me this review as she said it summed up why. Isadora comes off as whiny to some.

Fair enough. I can see this, but I would also argue that we hardly ever nail the guys for the same things when they are angsting about finding their place in the world, droning endlessly about their feelings of isolation, or how trapped they feel at the prospect of a new family or a career change. They aren’t whining, they are making sense out of important issues. We might even call them philosophers! (A wonderful book that centers on this quite a bit is Kenzeburo Oe’s A Personal Matter which I also reviewed. Wonderful book, the author eventually won a Nobel prize.)

I could agree with some of the reviewer’s comments about the plot, about the main character Isadora’s “problems.” She created a lot of them, and she is not always sympathetic. I could have cared less. What I will continue to recommend about this book are all the passages that sum up a particular situation or emotion, frustrations I had felt that someone else had finally legitimized. Erica Jong fictionalized several situations I had also found myself in, resenting the hell out whatever was going on and hating myself for smiling the whole time because that’s what good girls do. Can’t embarrass the man and his intellectual or physical failings, though he thinks he is being honest and helpful for pointing out yours.

What I find morbidly interesting is the fact that this book came out the year Roe v. Wade was passed. Could women in 1973 imagine that we would still have to listen to politicians make snide remarks about birth control in the year 2012? Maybe they could, maybe they were less optimistic than I am. For 2012, none of the situations or thoughts presented should be shocking. I’ve had much more graphic conversations with my friends over coffee at Starbucks, but I imagine in 1973 to see these thoughts in print, and to have people talking about zipless fucks, Tampax, and running away with that handsome stranger was something to see indeed.

To judge Fear of Flying, without benefit of the same social and political climate has got to be a mistake. To read this book now, I have to consider all the women who came before me, who divorced their husbands because they were not happy, who demanded to be taken care of in bed, who decided against having children so they could pursue their life’s goals. All of this surely could not have been as common and as acceptable as it is now. I would love to hear from any women who were adults at the time Fear of Flying came out and get a sense of what you think has changed if anything.

I can understand women who worked for a certain level of equality becoming impatient with Isadora and her angst, they were too busy making changes to stop and worry about anything else. Good for them, I send a sincere thank you and say God Bless. I would also would argue that being impatient with Isadora doesn’t make the angst any less relatable. Who hasn’t paid careful attention for half an hour while a male loved one spouted facts about a new civil war book he’s reading, only to have him put on an impatient face two minutes into your own explanation of something you find just as fascinating?

I would almost argue that the frustration the reader may feel with Isadora for making the decisions she does, staying with and listening to all her stupid male analysts, her infatuation with the infuriating Adrian, are part of what made me appreciate the book. My reactions to her behavior said a lot about me and I learned things about myself from having that experience. It is much easier to judge other women than to admit that we are often also mirrors of each other’s behavior. Sometimes I was ashamed to admit I had done some of the same things I was frustrated with Isadora for. She struggled with guilt for leaving a man who would in the end equal a lifetime of unhappiness and sacrifice. I know some women who say they don’t have time to write, to work on their art, to do any number of things that are important to them because hubby spends their after work time on his hobby. Someone after all has to look after the kids. At least they aren’t being bitchy and demanding like Isadora though. Where would we be if everyone were like her?

In the first few years of my marriage I am ashamed to admit I hardly read any of the books I loved so much because my husband, who doesn’t read, felt left out. Me, who came to that marriage with three full shelves of books and about ten different projects in mind! Fuck. Erica Jong has gone farther in identifying that bullshit female need to make everyone so goddam happy than anyone I have read before. She also did a beautiful job showing us how we force these ideas on our friends and our daughters. (Another reason I need to spend more time with the women.) In Isadora’s bitchiness, and refusal to just go along in many situations, I was reminded how easy it is to give up my own happiness, my own strength, my own ambition to take care of kids, hubby, friends who need me, whatever. Certainly they all matter to me, and certainly I cannot only live for me, or I would cease to be me, but does it have to be one or the other? Isadora Wing, though confused and clueless sometimes, stands up for herself, and when she doesn’t she stops to consider why. It was in these moments that I felt the most grateful.

What I did through most of the book was fold down pages and mark passages with my thumbnail until I was able to get ahold of a pencil. Don’t read this book for the story or for any kind of lesson about anything, unless of course you find something relevant in that. Read this book for what is relatable, good and bad. Here is one of my favorite passages:

“So I learned about women from men. I saw them through the eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn’t think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely.

Naturally I trusted everything they said, even when it implied my own inferiority.”

That last line almost made me ill it was so applicable to me. The passage goes on to give examples and when combined with all the men who keep telling her what is wrong with her and the fact that she listens to them makes the point yet again. Well what the fuck are you listening to them for? Makes you want to slap her and then hug her for finally coming to her senses. I challenge any woman to tell me she hasn’t ever done the same thing.

And guess who contributed a blurb…Henry Miller**!

“It is rare these days to come upon a book written by a woman which is so refreshing, so gay and sad at the same time, and so full of wisdom about the eternal man-woman problem.”

What I find interesting about the Miller quote is that he sees the problems Erica Jong shows us as “eternal.” Maybe they are when you consider that in some ways not much has changed about the dynamics between the sexes, we still routinely give up our dreams to support Him, nurture the family, while neglecting ourselves, and when we do finally stand up and take charge, we have to contend with a fair amount of guilt for doing so.

Maybe for me what is terrifying to admit is how easy it is to give up our best selves for some ideal that we can’t even identify in the real world. Ever since I read this book I have had even more reason to hate The Princesses.

Read this book. You may hate it, but I would hazard a guess that even then you will find some of yourself in this crazy woman’s thoughts and fantasies. This is an important book that I can’t believe more women haven’t read, and men for that matter. I also guess that everyone who reads it will take away something different and am eager to hear from anyone willing to discuss the book.

*Anyone read Outlander? My word! There were a few scenes in there that really worked for me and I have heard this from other women as well. That book is classified as a "historical romance."

** See my review of Tropic of Cancer. I love Henry Miller, but I never found much of his writing all that erotic either.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Uncensored Original Text

Sarah Martinez — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:06:30 GMT

Read the description of this book on Amazon, it almost made me cry.

Next, go and read the publishing philosophy for Perfect Edge Books, paying special attention to the bits on editorial services.

Two writers I have admired for years recently said, "underediting is better than overediting." One of them writes beautifully touching stories, the other I struggle with. Should that matter at all? No. The latter has won several awards for his work. Should the awards matter either? Probably not.

Is the tension between editor and author much different than it was in 1890? As editors we have to know, and must always remember that we have an enormous responsibility, both to the authors we work with and most importantly to readers. Often as editors it is tempting to think we always know best, because someone trusted us with that job.

Authors must remember, in this time when absolutely everyone from mentors, critique group buddies, and the barista at Starbucks has an opinion, we also have a responsibility to listen to the voice inside that guides our work.

There has to be a balance, there has to be...

Why You Have to Meet Phil Jourdan

Sarah Martinez — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Those of you who know me well have already heard about this guy. For the rest of you—I am about to gush. Hard. First, go to this website: slothrop.com so you can follow along. This guy is like the second coming of something I didn’t even know we all needed. Most of you know my feeling about academics,* but this one can actually speak English, and crack jokes at the same time. A funny Fiedler with less crust.

First I found this post on Franzen. Phil Jourdan put his finger on something that has both repulsed and endeared me to the author, the reason my patient friends continue to hear me either bitch, defend, or ramble aimlessly trying to make sense of what he does to me. In this time when it is too easy for people to blast Jonathan Franzen, this blogger from out of nowhere puts a finger on the conflicted feelings I have been trying to sort out since I saw him at Seattle Arts and Lectures. And I got more information on the famous Gaddis essay, and he made the topic engaging. There was so much supplemental information you could spend weeks chasing it all down. I never thought I would be a fan of a blogger. Aren’t these guys supposed to be lazy?

I subscribed to the blogs and watched fun stuff fill my inbox; a link to all things related to The Shining, obscure books reviews, and a set of drawings explaining the universe.

Then came this post: Sex and Writing: an erotics of the writing act.

Oh God.

For those who have read early versions of Sex and Death in the American Novel, or have heard me ramble about the notion that sex and reading are perfect metaphors for each other or if you have heard me complain about how smart male novelists almost always avoid dealing with sex, you will appreciate how excited I got. Visit the site and view the comments I left, did I sound like a nut or what?

Another great article he posted for LitReactor handles feminism for authors. The information on Lacan and Freud, feminism and the history of almost anything he covers are so thorough; you can tell he cares if the rest of us understand these topics and isn’t just spouting to see his own words on the page. The best part is that all I have to do is hang around his website and I will get a a good chunk of what I am missing in grad school without losing my own chipper attitude toward life, without leaving my family and without spending a truckload of money.

His memoir was just released, Praise of Motherhood. I will review it officially for Line Zero, but I can tell already, this is something amazing.

I was only a few pages in when I had to do that embarrassing thing I’ve done only a few times while reading a book; cover my eyes, then read the lines again:

The taboo of the child enamored of his parent is easy to misunderstand. The vulgarity of treating love as a purely sexual thing should be dismissed immediately. To be in love with your mother does not have to mean what common parlance would have it mean. When she died, I tried to think up things about my mother that I found repulsive: there was little. Perhaps, then, I had idealized her to such an extent that I was, in the literal sense, in love with her.

There is wonderful context that makes those lines work even better, but I don’t want to spoil anything. You can read my review, or better, get the book for yourself. My own mother’s passing may make this material something I am more sensitive to, but I don’t think that’s the reason since I just spent a year working on a memoir that covered the same topic. What I still can’t get over; about this book, about so many things he addresses, is that this guy I just found on the flippin’ internet is writing it all up better than I ever could. And just when I was beginning to discover the ladies**…

My piece in the last Line Zero gave a brief look at the creative process of musicians who are also writers. Phil Jourdan takes my notion that the two processes are closely related to another level completely. He is one half of the band Paris and the Hiltons. They do something called ‘lit rock,’ where they make music that even to my indie challenged ears sounds really good, and in a few places he will even read to you. I thought Metallica was advanced when they alluded to Lovecraft, this band goes so much farther and work songs around books like Absalom, Absalom!, Ezra Pound’s Cantos and they even worked an entire EP around The Recognitions.

If the last bits weren’t enough, he is also the founder of Perfect Edge Books and has some things to say on his publishing philosophy that will probably feel very familiar to many authors. Proof again that diverse and wonderful things are out there. You will be able to read more since he has graciously agreed to write an article for Line Zero.

I have gone crazy over a teacher before (Priscilla Long), I’ve been in love before (Junot Diaz), I’ve even been excited about various musicians (Cliff Burton, GaGa, Marilyn Manson) but this is different on a galactic level. I have not been this moved by a single teacher, writer or musician—for this many reasons, ever.

Here’s to hoping you find as much to gush about and recommend as I did. Stop by and visit his site. Check out the various bits of writing advice he gives, argue with him if you dare, and while you’re there, leave a comment… tell him Annie Wilkes says hi.

*Those intimate with the book will also recall the way Vivi loves to bash academics. Como mi amado Junot… like Alejandro… Phil Jourdan proves that they don’t all spend their lives massaging their egos and boring the crap out of us with their theories. Some of them actually do some good in the world.

**Stay tuned for the review of Fear of Flying…and I thought that would be glowing.

Pink Fish Press Featured on Arc of a Writer!

Sarah Martinez — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:04:10 GMT

Elena Hartwell, a local teacher, writer and playwright interviewed Renda and I for her spotlight on small presses. This week it was our turn at Pink Fish Press. You can find that interview here.

Renda's answers to the questions come first, and mine are after that. Elena asked great questions, and we both spent a lot of time trying to answer them in the most detailed way so the interview got long, but also covers topics that don't always come up in general discussions about publishing and small press.

Come visit Elena, read the post and leave a comment if you are so inclined. There is a lot more to add to the topics we addressed in this interview so anything extra will be welcome.

Book Review: A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe

Sarah Martinez — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:51:00 GMT

I wanted to give this five stars when I posted the review on Amazon, but thought that was hypocritical since I would only do that knowing the author won the Nobel Prize. With all that said, this was an awfully good book, even if it was disturbing. Not a fun read by any means, but sometimes it is good to step away from what is comfortable and think differently. Big fun for the masochistic misanthropes out there, and in the end good for those of us who believe in people as well. There were a few things that made up for the difficulty of following a distasteful character through some horribly depressing episodes.

I loved the sex scenes, again disturbing, but they felt very raw and honest and it is so refreshing to read literary men who are not afraid to go there, and more than once! The next time someone says sex scenes can't be long and mean something I will point to this book.

Also, some of the emotional failures felt familiar, so again the author was incredibly brave to have been able to look that far into human ugliness (possibly his own) to write this story.

The language was strange at times, though this is not surprising since this is a translation. A friend of mine read it in Japanese and said even there the vocabulary and diction read like an academic. There were a couple of places I felt like the text was confusing for no good reason, possibly due to an error either by the author or the translator. This was slight, though that doesn't diminish the fact that this is an important book and despite how emotionally hard it was to read, it moved along at a good clip.

More Than a Book Review of The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

Sarah Martinez — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:40:07 GMT

I loved this book.

The plot moved quickly and I felt sympathy for the main character Joan Castleman from the first page. I also felt like the book offered a few words of warning. Right away we know that Joan has fallen into a sad state of apathy and acceptance and want to know how she plans to remedy the situation. Several instances that made me nod my head were watching Joan judge other women, whether they were housewives, young hotties, or female writers. In each observation I was embarrassed to find echoes of thoughts I have also had— reminding me that sometimes we really are our own worst enemies.

It is hard to find an author who can handle gender politics that doesn’t turn me off. For most of my life “feminism” has been a very bad word. (I was raised by a militant anti-abortion activist and committed Republican.) I loved the detail in here where Joan notices the way other female writers are perceived and doesn’t want to be that way. That part was so relatable.

I never felt like I really got what all the famous female authors were complaining about until I read this. Lame I know, but I love my male authors and for a long time buried my head in the sand of that debate. What about Sandra Cisneros, Joan Didion, or Joyce Carol Oates, I would think. This book made me stop and consider the history of women doing anything; writing, child rearing, studying, building companies, whatever, and the costs and benefits to each endeavor.

I’ve been meaning to get this review up for a while and then the author Meg Wolitzer went and wrote this phenomenal essay, The Second Shelf that furthers the discussion in this book and also fits in with the discussion of how female writers are still perceived. Again, one of the only times I feel like I understand the issue. When I found this essay on Facebook, I didn’t see who the author was until I got to the very end. The entire time I was reading it I was thinking, this reminds me of The Wife!

Another essay that compliments these topics is Envy, by Katherine Chetkovich. She writes about living with a successful male author and covers all her own resentments, ruminations and insights. This essay is still remarkably fair and thoughtful. My guess is that in a hundred years when the boyfriend and many others have ceased to be important, this essay will still be around. In its honesty it captures such an important piece of our cultural and literary discussion and after I read this I was so grateful to her that she had written it. The next thing I did was go and buy her short story collection Friendly Fire, which incidentally won a prestigious literary prize, and of course, before the essay I had never heard of her. Points taken, though I wonder why she hasn’t published anything else? As always, more to ponder.

One last note, Alexandra Styron’s memoir Reading My Father gave me even more to chew on and compliments The Wife. It made me consider how much people sometimes give up to help another person succeed.

Book Review: The Erotica Writer's Husband

Sarah Martinez — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:40:29 GMT

This book was laugh out loud funny, starting with the first line of the first story, “Holy Moly, what a penny whistle. I’m talking cherubic.” I still crack up laughing at what comes next. The story this one came from, Small Minded, ends up being quite touching and sets up the reading experience for the rest of the book. Not since Marguerite Duras’s The Lover have I had that same sad hitch after finishing a book.

When I talk about books that handle sex in a realistic, human way, this is one I will continue to recommend. Munro’s descriptions of men and their parts, physical and emotional, as well as all the situations we women find ourselves in with them were incredible. She handles it all with intelligence and humor and gave insights into problems I have never had, but now feel I have a much keener understanding of. Isn’t literature supposed to make us feel more connected, and help us to understand each other?

In one way the title serves the book very well, as the content is often erotic; one of my favorite stories in the book, The Prince & the Soda Popper is fun and everything one would expect from a story labeled erotica. The Erotica Writer’s Husband was another one of those great stories that gives insight into a place I hadn’t thought to look and by the time I was through I felt like I was a better person for it. I hope readers won’t disregard the book because “erotica” is in the title. The word erotica, depending on individual prejudices may call up images of whips, chains, satin sheets and body oil. Not what you will find in this book at all...well, almost. One story featured a sex toy in a scene that can only be described as priceless.

The only reason I didn’t give the book five stars was because there were a few times the metaphors—while always funny and added to the voice—when they appeared one after the other sometimes felt over the top. Since this is a collection of stories that appeared separately, I imagine that if I had read each story on its own, as would happen if I read these in the various anthologies and magazines they appeared in, I probably would not have noticed this at all.

So far I have bought this book for two of my friends and will likely do so again. This is a rare book, I highly recommend it and look forward to the next book from Ms. Munro.

For a link to the book on Amazon, click here.

To sample some of her writing and find out about the other things she does, click here to be taken to her blog, the latest post had me nodding my head and laughing at how similar husbands can sometimes be.

Interview with Sheila Hageman

Sarah Martinez — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 03:26:18 GMT

I worked a fair bit of my own life into the interview I did with Sheila Hageman, author of the newly released memoir Stripping Down, that I edited for Pink Fish Press. I wanted to explain why when I already had plenty on my plate I took this project anyway.

Sheila, your book spoke to me on several levels. Before I get to the interview portion of this, I wanted my readers to know why the story you present in Stripping Down relates so well to my own life.

When I was eleven and moved to Maryland from Montana my world changed dramatically. How I looked didn’t matter as a child; playing with frogs, reading Peter Benchley, and building snow forts. In Maryland, even in middle school, girls were teasing their hair, painting their nails and either dating or trying to get this or that boy to notice them. For the first time my appearance mattered. I had the thickest most awful glasses, braces, hair that wouldn’t cooperate, no fashion sense and a mother who thought that makeup and trying to be pretty were a sign of weakness. She wanted me to have character and not try to be like everyone else. In the end this made me a stronger person, but at the time it was just plain torturous.

I had the worst time with bullies in middle school and in the end, to provide some relief and in a pathetic search for validation, I discovered boys, and then much older men. Through their view of me, and my interpretation of how I thought I should be based on all the bits of input I got from culture at the time (Gotta love those Whitesnake videos!), I found a place for myself where I had some value. At the time I knew there was something cowardly in this and that I was cheating my way out of some important life test, but I didn’t care.

I liked the illusion that there were two of me, the ugly girl in school, and outside of school the daring one who got into strange cars, made out in the back of the movie theater, smoked and chatted on party lines late into the night. I had fun and didn’t care to think about consequences, of which I still think there were shockingly few for the amount of shit I got myself into. For several years I was desperate for attention and diversion from a home life with a manic depressive mother and absent father. The way you depicted this compartmentalization, both as a way to live, and a way to justify behaviors was something I really identified with.

I have always hated the role of victim that women assign to ourselves and each other when we go about trying to define ourselves by pleasing men, and your story spoke to me in that regard as well. You showed the thinking that went into the decisions you made and took responsibility for your choices. Very refreshing.

Several years ago, at the same time that I was entering new motherhood, my own mother began a decline due to mental illness coupled with COPD. The feelings of depression, fatigue, guilt, and longing that I experienced during that time I found echoed in your story with your mother. At the exact time I was trying to figure out who I was as a wife, new mother and a career woman— running myself ragged climbing the corporate ladder— I was also looking back at my history with my mother, trying to mend fences and do right by her. Every visit with her felt heavy and important as I knew she wouldn’t be around much longer. I loved the way you presented the complications of this situation and the physical and spiritual realities of grief.

SM: When did you first start to feel like you were moving out of the old “stripper” mindset, where you evaluated and judged yourself based on how others saw you, and began to feel that you knew who you were and no longer had to look outside for validation?

SH: Wow, it’s tough to pinpoint when that mindset began to change. I guess the process actually began when I was a stripper. Repeatedly being shown how it really didn’t matter what I looked or what I gave to a customer worked on a deep level inside my psyche. So even though I still had the need for the admiration and “love” from the outside, unconsciously I was realizing I would never be all things to everyone.

Through my years of stripping and modeling I slowly came to acknowledge that the attention I received wasn’t really satisfying me either. There was a disconnect between what I thought I wanted and what I was actually receiving.

Then when I was twenty-four and my mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer I came face-to-face with the unimportance of the beauty of a physical body. All of a sudden there were much deeper issues surrounding a woman’s body.

I think being faced with my mother’s mortality woke me up to what I was doing not only to and with my body, but to myself by not honoring who I was at the time. And I was a woman who wanted more than just being a body.

SM: How much of a part in how you saw yourself did your mother play, as opposed to the experience of finding the porn as an adolescent? That bit was so very relatable. When I was first looking around at the world, I found Playboys both in my father’s closet and more hard core stuff in homes I babysat for. Traci Lords was all over the news, and Dorothy Stratton’s murder was recently made into a movie. That contrasted very strongly with my mother’s macho feminism that said women were every bit equal to men and didn’t have to dress up, wear makeup etc.

SH: We have so much in common in this area, Sarah! Felt the same confusion over the mixed messages I was receiving. There was what my parents had raised me to believe in about me being able to be and do anything I wanted, but at the same time I saw my mother suffering in a career and marriage she didn’t feel like she had any control over.

So how could I really understand and learn what it meant to be an active agent in a healthy way for my life? My own mother didn’t seem to be able to be who she wanted to be and she was an adult.

Finding the porn magazines in my basement really seemed to show me the truth of what a woman was meant to be.

And there was never a sense of being loved and perfect just the way I was. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me or take good care of me because she did. She was just so caught up in her own drama that it was hard for her to teach me through example what self-love looks like.

I never felt special enough just being me. So I think I began to try to be more somehow. I tried to give my parents and everyone else in the world a reason to love me and find me special.

Whom did I see receiving special attention and admiration? The porn women who were so special and controversial that they had to be locked away.

SM: You worked very hard to capture the experience of memory, both looking back on events and depicting the way they sneak up on you. You moved from past to present tense in an attempt to create immediacy for the reader, in the same way you experienced the memories yourself. Did you have any models for this type of structure?

SH: This is where my time studying for my Master’s in Creative Writing really helped me. When I started my graduate work I thought I already knew the story I had to tell—a coming-of-age story about a woman who became a stripper and eventually escaped that life.

But as I began delving into what I was experiencing in the present moment—being a new mother and my mother’s advancing illness—I discovered that what I felt I needed to write about was not yet discovered.

I trusted the writing process as I wrote not only about my present, but also allowed the present to be an entryway into my past. That’s when the writing got exciting and took on a life of its own—when I allowed myself to be led by the memories as opposed to trying to force a structure on my thoughts and be linear.

Some of the memoirs I studied and was deeply influenced by when it comes to this kind of fluid structure were Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments.

Auster made his process become part of his story, played with time, and wove his themes seamlessly throughout. Overall though, the largest lesson I learned from Auster was that I needed to free myself from the linear, chronological structure that I had trapped my “stripper story” within.

I began to make my writing process a part of my memoir because just having interesting experiences does not a memoir make. As I allowed the process to become part of the story, I ruminated more on what it was I was trying to say and broke free from the strictly chronological story.

Auster’s crafting of time helped me learn that there are ways to use time to achieve emotional effects. He works with the assumption that time is not rigid. Everything is happening in memory at the same time. Auster constantly shifts between themes in his memory, going where he needs to be according to his associations, even if he’s been to that same place many times before.

In my mind all my past experiences aren’t arranged chronologically, they are filed away associationally and this is the way to rediscover what my memories are trying to teach me—follow my memories and see where they take me and how they connect my past stories.

The structure or controlling metaphor that Gornick uses to carry her themes out is the walks between her mother and herself. These walks successfully connect the present to the past and allow the author to carry the reader along through the story with a certain sense of physical, temporal movement.

This resonated deeply with me because so much of my writing had to do with movement of the body. I asked myself what might be a controlling metaphor or structure that I could use to connect the present with the past and create a feeling of temporal movement and that’s when I realized the importance of car rides in my life and how those drives on I-95 as a stripper were the exact reverse drives I was then making as I visited my ill mother.

But I knew that writerly device had to be in service of something deeper. And then I began playing with ideas of women’s body image at different stages of life and how female family members relate. A lot of questions and insights began to open up.

Gornick’s book about mother-daughter relationships pushed me into further exploration of my own female relationships. It seems that I have always been trying to prove how different I am from my mother, just as the narrator does in Fierce Attachments. I had ignored this fact for a long time in my writing. I begin to examine the theme of parameters and boundaries and how my parents raised me with no sense of how to create them for myself. I had to figure it out on my own. I closed my father out and took my mother in. I accepted her problems as my own. As a young adult, when I needed to break away from the claustrophobic feeling of taking care of my mother, I tested my boundaries around sex. I had to break free from being responsible for my mother’s happiness.

All of these questions spiraled through me as I wrote. My life and my story were just in no way chronological. Just as I played with boundaries and accepted ways of “being” in life, I found my story had to do the same.

SM: How did the men in your book react to seeing themselves in your story? I am thinking mostly about your ex-husband Tim, your father and Nick, your current husband.

SH: Well, the only one of these men who has read the book is Nick. I am so grateful that he understands my need to write about my life. I sometimes joke to him that he knew I was a memoirist before he married me, so he’s get no one to blame but himself!

But Nick really has been nothing but supportive. He’s never questioned anything I’ve written about him. I think the only concerns he has are for her children in the long run since I do write about them, too. I definitely want to keep them safe and be respectful, but they’re huge parts of my life and I don’t know how to write about life without writing about them, too.

My father will probably not read the book. I talked to him about it. He knew I was writing about these difficult topics for a long time. It’s difficult because I love my father deeply and mean him no harm and I explained I think the book is fair and loving toward him. But regardless, what father would really feel comfortable reading about intimate details of their daughter’s life?

My ex-husband, Tim? I don’t know if he will read it. I did speak with him a few months ago to just really be honest with him and tell him what was in the book. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time but never felt like it was right to nose my apology into his new life.

I felt it was more my responsibility to come to a level of apology and forgiveness within myself without having to dredge up stuff that he probably no longer had interest in. But when I knew the book would be published, I knew it was only fair to be the one to talk to Tim rather than having him read something about me or hear about what I had written from someone else.

All I can offer at this point of my life is an apology to Tim. I can’t go back in time and change what I did or how I hurt people in my life. I can be the best person I can be now. And I really think I am doing well now with who I am and how I treat people in my life.

I’m only sorry I didn’t come into my integrity sooner in life.

SM: Grief and the accompanying fatigue, irritability and hopelessness, not to mention the sense of being overwhelmed were also a big part of the book, though you showed these more before your mother died than after. Would you say you have learned anything about grief that you weren’t able to include in the book due to structure and relevance issues?

SH: Absolutely. The strongest metaphor for grief that leaps into my mind is the writing process itself. What I mean is that grief is such a process that needs to be experienced over time in incremental steps.

Louise DeSalvo, whom I studied with, had the greatest and simplest message when it came to the writing process that I tell all my writing students—work according to the stage you’re at.

So when you’re freewriting, you’re not worrying about structure. When you’re editing, you’re not worrying about coming up with new ideas.

With grief, you need to allow yourself the room to be where you are and not try to move through it too quickly. It’s a natural process that works best when it is allowed to do just that—work, and not be rushed.

SM: You teach writing and work with women as a yoga teacher as well. How common would you say the themes in your story are?

SH: Amazingly common. The more I learn about how different we all are, the more I realize the similar themes that run though our lives as women.

It seems like a few of the deepest and most common themes in my book deal with the complexity of desires and needs. How we express these themes in our lives is going to differ according to so many factors, but we all experience these deeply rooted issues that then express themselves through different and more specific themes.

But what woman has not dealt with relationship issues stemming from their relationships with their parents? What modern woman has not had some issue in coming to terms with her body image, with her sexuality, or with her self-love?

I believe the more women explore and share their authentic stories, the healthier we will all become. It is through the act of writing and reading that we can make sense of these deeply held beliefs that can either hold us back or allow us to be set free.

SM: I may have to steal my new motto from you: “the more women share their authentic stories, the healthier we will all become. It is through the act of writing and reading that we can make sense of these deeply held beliefs that can either hold us back or allow us to be set free.”

The use of the word authentic is important here, that is all I can ever hope to be as a writer and as a human.

Stripping Down by Sheila Hageman Free Today on Amazon

Sarah Martinez — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:35:17 GMT

The book I edited for Pink Fish Press, Stripping Down, will be free on Amazon today. Pick up a copy and if you are so moved, post a review on Amazon, Goodreads and anywhere else you like to go for book reviews.

http://www.amazon.com/Stripping-Down-ebook/dp/B0077T6DHQ/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1329236057&sr=8-5

I am proud of this book and our author Sheila. I will post separately about why her book mattered to me along with a short interview.

Book Review: From Where You Dream

Sarah Martinez — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:27:33 GMT

Robert Olen is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the Francis Eppes Professor in English at Florida State University. From Where You Dream was originally a collection of Butler’s lectures that Janet Burroway edited into book form. In Burroway’s glowing introduction, she explains what Butler does in the lectures:

“His self-declared obsessions have to do with the descent into the dreamspace of the unconscious in order to discover the yearning that is at the center of every person and therefore to every character, and with the moment-to- moment sensual experience of that character’s story.”

This book must be read from beginning to end. To skim, or try to get a general sense of it will be to lose the power of his tone. He gives measured and specific advice not only on getting to the dreamspace, but his comforting words on dealing with rejection, insights into the state of modern literary fiction never seemed more appropriate. He addresses, as do all master teachers, the importance of reading and he explains how to read— both for pleasure and for criticism.

“You should read slowly. You should never read a work of literary art faster than would allow you to hear the narrative voice in your head. Speed-reading is one reason editors, and not incidentally, book reviewers can be so utterly wrongheaded about a particular work of art.”

Butler’s methods are very prescribed; about how to tap into the dreamspace, how and when to write, even how to journal:

“…return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion.”

Butler argues convincingly for the effectiveness of his methods throughout the book, one of which is using index cards to record scenes and structure the novel. He outlines how to fill out the cards, and why one must not vary from his suggestions. Another example of how specific he gets is in an exercise later in the book where he has a student recall an anecdote with the most sensory detail possible, focusing on where in the body a sense and emotion comes from. He asks his student questions like, “How did you know your brother was behind you?” and “Where did you feel his presence?” There is also a written exercise that focused students on an object that evoked anxiety. These, as well as his discussions of how dreams and films work, illustrate how we already deep down know how to get to the core of a scene, and the corresponding emotion.

This was my favorite writing book for many years. I am happy to find that everything that struck me as important when I first picked it up is still very much relevant to today.

About Me Page to Archives

Sarah Martinez — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:57:31 GMT

After over two years I have accumulated enough professional credentials to update my about page with more impressive material. I still want to keep this up somewhere in case anyone wants to get a better idea of where the darkness and bizarre commentary come from, and I know you do!

Literary Heroes: Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Marco Vassi, Anne Rice, Richard Russo, Stephen King and Clive Barker

Current author favorites include: Henry Miller, John Daniel, David Foster Wallace, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Boswell, Junot Diaz, Vladimir Nabokov and Meg Wolitzer

THE PAST

Born in the South, and raised on both coasts, Sarah Martinez has seen and done a lot. Some might say too much, but where's the fun in that? Sarah says: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger, but that doesn't mean it won't leave a mark." She thinks of her stories as a way to show off the marks and hopes for rave reviews.

The days spent fishing, camping beside deep mountain lakes, exploring hillsides covered in Huckleberries, to the culture shock of living in Washington DC, the people she met, and places she landed as a runaway, all make for lively conversation and reading material.

She tells outrageous stories about scary rehabs, sadistic counselors, escape attempts, and life afterward with a manic depressive mother who was heavily involved in Republican politics. Her life is a comic stew of events, both shocking and hilarious.

Sarah wrote her first book and self-published it at the age of seven, when she wrote the original words and pictures to the children's title which shall remain nameless, lest her critics judge her unfairly.

Sarah had a hard time adjusting to life on the east coast, and at fourteen began running away from home; at one point making it all the way to Los Angeles. As a result over one year of her life was spent behind the cold concrete walls of a warehouse in Springfield, VA, known as Straight, Inc. After this she spent several years attempting to find herself before moving back to Montana with her mother and sisters. She was to see her father rarely thereafter.

Sarah found growing up a difficult task. From the age of eighteen to twenty six she lived with a convicted sex offender and watched way too much porn. At the age of twenty six she finally woke up and graduated from Seattle University with a degree in International Business, believing that if she got an English degree she would end up broke.

THE PRESENT

She is married with two lively daughters and finds that life with a family and career is a constant balancing act.

She finds inspiration in everything from the comments of Rush Limbaugh to the music and performances of Marilyn Manson and most recently Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel.

She loves to ski, dance the Argentine tango, and read, read, read.

Back to Early Mornings

Sarah Martinez — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:09:44 GMT

It feels like forever since I was up early and actually productive. I should NOT be blogging at this hour, sapping the magic flow I have at this time of day--the reason for getting up this early--flow that should only be used for fiction writing, but I wanted to mark the occasion.

My grandmother died December 17th, and this on top of an incredibly busy year end made any sort of creative work impossible, almost anything impossible really. So now that I am back at it, wish me luck, this book if due NOW!

My First Panel Appearance: Nov. 20th at 2pm

Sarah Martinez — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:29:10 GMT

For the first time ever I will be on a panel! As an editor! I will be appearing with two other wonderful editors from the NW Independent Editor's Guild on Sunday November 20th at 2pm at University Bookstore in Seattle. Come check us out, wish me luck, and admire my blue hair and stack of old Nanowrimo manuscripts.

Book Review: The Golden Theme

Sarah Martinez — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:21:29 GMT

The Golden Theme

By Brian McDonald

Libertary Editions 2010

The author has an impressive set of Hollywood credentials. From the back cover of the book:

“Brian McDonald has taught his story seminar at PIXAR, DISNEY FEATURE ANIMATION and George Lucas’s ILM. His award-winning short film WHITE FACE has run on HBO and Cinemax and is used in corporations nation-wide as a diversity-training tool.”

Also, impressive was the fact that Charles Johnson, a National Book Award winner wrote a glowing forward for The Golden Theme.

Think of this as a seminar as opposed to a writing text. The main purpose of the book is to highlight and give examples of ways to find our common humanity. If you take nothing else from the book, it will be the theme that “we are all the same.” Even the bad guys.

If you are having trouble creating realistic characters your readers can identify with, McDonald includes powerful examples of ways to imagine yourself in someone else’s skin. He also points out ways we are more alike than we might think. Villains still need a dose of humanity to make them believable and our heroes cannot be too perfect, or the audience will have trouble identifying with them.

One especially effective example the author gives is of having to imagine the character of a slave holder. After explaining the historical circumstances that created a climate where slaveholders may have lived in fear for their lives, he asks us to imagine a motivation for being especially harsh.

“Find the thing that would make you behave as the cruelest of slaveholders and you will have found his humanity and your own.”

McDonald explains that the purpose of stories since the beginning of time is to give us valuable survival information, and to soothe our souls through the magic of story, letting us know we are not alone. The Golden Theme is a less a “how to” and more of a reminder of a higher artistic purpose.

“Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings—and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know that they are not alone.”

Phenomenal Speech at Writers on the Sound 2011

Sarah Martinez — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:13:51 GMT

John Daniel who I already blogged about once, has generously shared a link to his speech so anyone who was unable to attend the conference will be able to read it.

http://www.johndaniel-author.net/oddsandends.php#wots

Edmonds Writers on the Sound

Sarah Martinez — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:49:34 GMT

This was an excellent conference. No agents or editors so the focus was just craft and networking. They capped the attendees to 200 so there was also a feeling of intimacy and friendliness.

John Daniel was the featured speaker on Saturday afternoon. Wonderful talk, I've already told three of my other writer friends about how great the talk was. I took his poetry class. Poetry for me... what a concept, and I learned a lot and have so much more to do now on my own. I may even have a new opening page for my novel.

What I loved the most about his talk and the message in his class was finding that by evoking particular images, you can evoke a specific emotion in your writing. This was something I thought I understood, moved on from and then somehow over the weekend, the real power of that concept hit home. I am inspired to learn more and start my own practice of harvesting images and trying to place them together to make something that might effect someone else.

If anyone else is curious about this author, click here for a link to his site: John Daniel-author.net.

Writer Rescource: Robert Olen Butler

Sarah Martinez — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:20:10 GMT

Among many other things, Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his collection of short stories, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain and is the Francis Eppes Professor in English at Florida State University. In 2001 he recorded seventeen webcasts where he let the world watch him create a short story from beginning to end. This is an important resource for any emerging writer, and it can be found at www.fsu.edu/butler.

Taos ready

Sarah Martinez — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:47:46 GMT

As of Friday I will be away from internet connection....that's the plan anyway. No twitter, no facebook, no email. Just me, other writers, my books and my words. I'm almost ready, doing my last minute conference prep, only this time I will be gone over a week and the prospect of missing the family is very real.

Conferences, though busy, are usually times to reconnect with the writer inside and remember what my goals are. She is also tired of continually having to collect her thoughts and start again. I hope I don't spend the whole time missing my interruptions. This is the first conference I will attend where writing and reading are the focus so I hope I'll have enough distraction. This conference will be my church. I hope I am up to the task. As a young Argentine once said, "I must Fukus."

My manuscript has been edited by a very wise professional who made excellent revision suggestions, and I will have a whole week with Priscilla Long to polish sentences. After that I will spend two days contemplating my memoir(s). It seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but now that my ulcer is back i'm not so sure.

Book Review Part II: Wilderness by Robert Penn Warren

Sarah Martinez — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:56:03 GMT

I said in my last post that the test of this book would be if it stuck. It has, and how. When I was rewriting a short story to send in to an anthology, I kept thinking about how I was using color in the room descriptions and even in the dialogue. The imagery in general, the pacing of the story and the way the author left out bits of information or manipulated them to make the reader uncomfortable, also came back when I was rethinking the way I presented information for my own readers. Especially in a short space, the techniques RPW used are especially effective-- something a poet I discussed the book with mentioned as well. I feel like it is all coming together: my study, my discussion, my writing.

What this says to me is that this book, or maybe just the action of reading closely and focusing on technique, has come back to serve me already. If anyone was put off reading Wilderness by my blog post, I would say I am much more ready to recommend it to other readers, and especially other writers, than I was before.